Lessons from Rocky IV

The older I get the more I appreciate Rocky IV. Not for the reasons most people think of though. The film gets criticized as American propaganda constantly. It’s easy to see why. Rocky Balboa is the best of American grit and determination, a working class hero. Ivan Drago is the opposite. He reflects a cheating Soviet Union interested in winning at all costs. He is the product of drug enhancement, cruelty and fitness tech run amok. The theme most people see from the movie is that honesty and fair play beat underhanded state influenced cheating. Or as I like to say "We kicked your ass Russia!"

Rocky IV predicted the Russian tricks that cast a pall over the Winter Olympics in 2014, accidentally of course. Their state sponsored doping program got them banned from the last Olympics. But for the obvious good versus evil messaging in the movie, it holds up today because of the conflict it imagined between technology and human achievement. This theme runs in the background like antivirus software, scanning the plot points and making sense of the Cold War.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, here it is in nutshell. Rocky’s longtime nemesis turned friend, Apollo Creed, challenges the powerful Russian, Ivan Drago, to a boxing match. It takes place in Las Vegas under a garish patriotic display. The most famous image is off a muscular Creed in an American flag top hat dancing to James Brown’s “Living in America”. Creed gets beat up bad but refuses to let Rocky throw in the towel. Drago eventually kills Creed with crushing hay-makers and a total lack of emotion “If he dies, he dies.” Rocky feels responsible and challenges Drago to a match in Moscow, to avenge Creed. At this point the training begins. Rocky in the snowy mountains cut off from all technology and distractions, while Drago trains machine like in the gym/lab.

Early in the film there is a scene with Rocky’s pugnacious brother in law Paulie. Paulie complains about the butler robot rolling around the house fetching drinks and helping with basic chores. He quickly gets comfortable though. Paulie’s discomfort with the robot falls apart when he realizes the machine makes his life demonstrable easier. The inherent message is clear, technology can make life better in some ways. The question from the film that plays out is this “When does technology begin to alter human behavior?” Ivan Drago shows that it can be manipulated.

He isn’t just a tool of a merciless regime using sport for dominance. He is also part machine. Doctors, engineers and politburo officials remain a fixture in his training. His gym is a gaggle of equipment monitoring his progress, trainers injecting him with steroids, punching bags registering impact. In the character of Ivan Drago we see the dark side of technology, something used to transform human nature. Rocky is human grit; Drago is cold mechanics. The geo political framework (United States and the Soviet Union) is embedded in the plot, but the secondary plot of living with technology is more prescient. 

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What strikes me is how timely this part of the story is to today, especially in sports and fitness. Former Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson has a show on Netflix investigating how trainers and tech companies are creating better athletes through science. A lot of it is gadgets like wearable sensors in clothing and monitors that track breathing or show muscle exertion. The developers are clear about the limits of their products though. They aren’t intended to take middle aged dads from TV watcher to world class Olympians, but they do think tech provides slight advantages to competitive athletes. Most of it seems unlikely to improve performance on a grand scale, but it suggests a certain comfort Americans have with altering human physical constraints.

 A company called “Halo” makes a brain stimulation device that sends electrical pulses to the motor cortex. The electrical signals supposedly increase endurance by allowing neurons to fire quicker. These gadgets are mostly unproven (internal research aside) but they could also be the beginnings of brain enhancement. Since competition at high levels requires thought control, mind altering tech isn’t that far off.

A lot of this new technology in analyzing athletic prowess is probably an attempt to sell to high end gear to the general public. Parents with kids in high school sports certainly want to stay on top of safety and performance improvements. The fact remains that innovation in wearables, and especially cognition, is seeping into competition at every level. At what point does this technology become too much? At what point does it create a person become more machine than human? We are quite a ways from creating superhumans in labs but it isn't out of reach either. The best of the new innovation for athletes is in monitoring vital functions and injury prevention, which isn’t new really. They’ve just gotten better at gauging things like muscle fatigue and oxygen levels. The bulk of research is in concussion prevention for football helmets and headbands. There is a lot focus on training to prevent injury through muscle development.

Expensive training facilities like Michael Johnson’s in Dallas offer the best of what was once exclusive to NFL teams and Olympic facilities. The ones who show promise and can pay hefty fees have advantages that high school teams have never had.

Our collective comfort with the future of sports tech will be balanced by the importance we place on competition. I am a bit pessimistic on this. I’m not against improving performance or in using gadgets to monitor vitals. The safety innovations are great also. But if improvements start to replace biology than sports become about something other than human ability. Steroids and blood doping are considered by everyone to be cheating. Tech opens up a new frontier though for new developments in enhancement and cognitive improvements that didn’t exist before. The conflict in Rocky IV is with us like it never was in 1985.

I won’t draw lines yet, but at some point we might have to.